"There are a number of Quake players that just want to play their Quake, right? And they are familiar with the business model of our previous games, and they are totally fine. ‘I want to buy the game. I want to start playing. I want to have access to all the Champions.’"

No, rofl. The people who wants to "play their Quake" doesn't give a single shit about your champions.

15 years ago, I looked up to this person. I mean Willits. Seriously. But now, whenever his face appears in any kind of interview or there's an article quoting him, I always wonder what lie / cluelessness will leave his mouth. He started out as a genius mapper and a few steps later, he became a complete Zeniwhore.

I've been curious what their grand strategy was as far as marketing plan goes.

We're not even in closed beta and the last few weeks of info drip and slow hype building have actually been promising (and deliberate). For instance, we've had:

- Intel telling ESL that they 'miss Quake' (I won't say this was anything deliberate, but it's in the periphery)

- FACEIT QW tournament at D.I.C.E.; aka an obvious hand-off for Willits to get some Twitch exposure to spam, "Play Quake Champions!" -- especially to a small chunk of the OW crowd who was watching to cheer on their boy, Jeff 'tigole' Kaplan.

I know that ESR's default is to give everything shit. Plus Tim Willits basically can do no right to most of you, but obviously id/bethesda are taking this very seriously.

IMO, he's actually doing a very good job at wearing the hat of business exec guy and make a damn fun game guy.

We can also give Jeff Kaplan shit, too, as a lot of us here don't really enjoy Overwatch. But that's another example of needing the right mind who can juggle the needs of making a good game and the needs of smartly managing business interests vs. player base demands.

That said, 2 pieces of this decision that give me some pause and warrant discussion:

- anti-cheat / cheat population mitigation

- only offering 1 champion with F2P

Anti Cheat

We all know that F2P significantly multiplies this problem, and this is one element of QC that we've heard absolutely nothing on. I think they've been coming correct on everything so far, but hearing nothing on their plans to combat cheating makes me wonder how much they've dedicated to it.

The 2 top dog FPS, CS:GO and OW have blown their load's before they even got it out of their pants imo. CS:GO most likely because if the game isn't DotA2, Valve doesn't give it proper dev support, and OW both because I think they were in over their heads with regards to FPS cheating issues and being shackled to PC Bangs in Korea.

I don't want the bar to only have to be slightly higher than this, but all id needs to do is understand if they at least do better than those 2 with regard to cheaters, they will have a significant advantage in a world where Quake Champions conceivably resides in a top 3 FPS population.

It's a cat and mouse game that always favors the cheaters, but let's just hope they have a solid plan to mitigate it as much as possible. Especially in the lower rungs where you threaten to drive out your casual players.

F2P Details and Decisions

If they're counting on the skins, varied characters, and customization to pull in the more casual player base, I'd think that offering 3-5 'Free Champions' would be a better decision than just stapling them into 1. This assumes they have enough Champions on roll-out to not cut too deep into the roster (so 3 sounds like a safe number).

But we also don't know enough about the Favor system yet, and perhaps they're confident that it will give enough variety while incentivizing players of all levels spending money on the game.

F2P isn't a choice they arrived at by asking a magic 8-ball, though I am a little surprised they did in part because OW waffled on this and ultimately opted out of marketing F2P and was wildly successful.

But Quake as F2P makes sense in that the game is almost universally loved and respected. You can plop anyone down into an FFA (assuming equally unskilled or skilled players) and they'll have a lot of fun.

The fact that they seem to be pushing a team based mode should increase the addicting factors of the actual game. Today's weak-ass gamers stick around longer when they can point the finger at several others. It's just the unfortunate state of modern human psychology. I mean, there's a fucking reason Overwatch refuses to add a proper scoreboard even in the post-game.

Not all players are created equal. You can't have a successful game without placing your little box of addiction inside another layer of addiction like a matroyshka doll.

In this case, all of the things most of us gameplay purists don't care about. Skins, RNG lootboxes, skill rating progression. Not only does this further reinforce addicting behavior, but it keeps those who simply suck and don't ever improve at the actual game feeling rewarded and like they're progressing in some way.

Variable reward schedules are king. The gameplay looks solid in what little has been seen, but what really has my hype building is seeing how they're showing how much care they put in the decision making to hook casual players.

Ask ourselves this: if a game with such a low skill-ceiling/curve as Overwatch can bring all of the top FPS talent from -every- FPS game not named Counter-Strike into one place, then why the hell wouldn't the ugliest bastard Quake with a sizable player base, e-sports investment, proper developer support, and marketing hype not be successful?

(and I don't consider what I've seen of QC to be bastard Quake at all, it looks pretty worthy)